It’s been more than two years since Mike Suter took off his Petoskey High School football uniform for the final time.

He dazzled during his junior year in 2008, running for 1,362 yards and scoring a then-school record 25 touchdowns, and leading Petoskey to a Big North Conference co-championship and a playoff victory. He was one of just two players selected as a first-team all-conference on both sides of the ball, and he earned All-State honors.

Outstanding as a junior, the 6-foot, 200-pounder would surely be even better as a senior. Isn’t that the normal order of things?

He was the most talented player on the field most Friday nights, maybe one of the best in Northern Michigan. He entered 2009 with high expectations, both for himself and the team.

Then, he got hurt. His back hurt, had hurt for a long time, but he managed it with physical therapy, played over it.

Then it was the leg, the calf, in the third game of the season.

He believed at the time it was a torn calf muscle. Grit your teeth, suck it up, and play.

Then an ever-more-painful back became too much, and it sidelined him for the final four regular-season games.

He returned for Petoskey’s playoff game, an 8-0 loss to West Branch Ogemaw Heights. He gave it his best, but it was clear he wasn’t the Suter of old.

Two long grueling years later, Mike Suter is ready to return to football. He plans to enroll in January at Grand Valley State University and will attend walk-on tryouts on Jan. 13.

If he makes it, the one-time Big Man on Campus at Petoskey will be on the bottom rung of the football ladder, starting from scratch, behind the guys on scholarship, behind the preferred walk-ons.

“I sat down and thought about it for awhile and thought, You know, it’s worth a shot,” Suter says. “I’m not going in with any shoes to fill or anything. I’m just going in to see what I can do. If it works out, awesome. If not, I chose Grand Valley for the school and because it had programs I wanted.”

At one time, all Suter wanted was football. That changed over the past two years.

After all, it’s about education and growth, isn’t it? And it was from having football taken away from him that Suter made some big-time strides.

Bad news

A day after Petoskey lost in Suter’s final high school football game, he went to the doctor and discovered what he thought was a torn calf muscle was actually a fractured fibula.

And the back? One disk was bulging, another was torn. The disks were pressing on a nerve, causing excruciating eye-popping pain, severely limiting his mobility.

“I shouldn’t have played in the playoff game,” Suter says now.

But football had given Suter so much, and he had given back.

He was Joe Robbins before Joe Robbins was Joe Robbins.

Robbins, two years Suter’s junior and his eventual successor as Petoskey’s star, verbally committed to Grand Valley last week.

Robbins was heavily sought after by the Lakers and even drew serious attention from the big boys, Division I programs at Michigan State and Central Michigan.

Suter was there once too. Heading into his senior year in 2009, there were plenty of calls from the likes of Michigan Tech and Ferris State, along with Division III Alma, and even Central Michigan.

When he got hurt, the calls stopped.

“You had to be honest and up front (with recruiters),” Petoskey coach Kerry VanOrman says. “He was having back problems and we didn’t know what was going to happen then.

“He had tremendous upside. It was just sad that that happened to him.”

It was a crushing disappointment for Suter.

An assistant coach from Ferris told him the hard truth.

“He said, ‘I know you can play at our school, but the back injury is something that nobody’s going to take a gamble on you. ... If anybody tells you anything different, they’re lying to you,’” Suter says. “I appreciated that. It wasn’t fun to hear, but I’d rather hear the truth.”

With that, Suter contacted the coaches who, on the surface, still seemed interested. Because of his health, college football wasn’t in Mike Suter’s immediate future.

“Through that winter he was in quite a bit of pain,” VanOrman says, recalling 2009-10. “He could barely sit down in class and I remember seeing him after Christmas Break at a basketball game and he said he was having all kinds of problems.”

Physical therapy did little to ease the pain in his back.

In March, 2010, the spring of his senior year — supposedly one of the greatest times in a young person’s life — Suter underwent surgery.

It was the first step on a long road back.

And on a journey to self discovery and growth.

Frustration

The post-surgery healing process was slow and frustrating.

“I went through quite a few months of being seized up on the couch, not being able to move,” Suter says. “It was frustrating. It’s hard to explain. Even looking back, I’ve lost track of how awful it really felt. I felt like I was locked up.

“I was always an active kid and to sit there and not move, and not even be able to move, it was a killer.”

It also left him an awful lot of time to reflect, both on football and who he was, and what he wanted to become.

Being able to walk, to move, to function again like an able-bodied human being, that was the goal at that point.

Football? Well, yeah, maybe. Some day.

“It was a big blow not to be able to (play in college) because I’d worked four years toward that goal,” he said. “I got to the point where I accepted it. I just sort of had the mind set that if I get healthy enough, I’ll give it a shot, but if I’m not healthy enough I won’t.”

Accepting that the back injury might be the end of athletics was a hard pill to swallow.

He was no longer Mike Suter, Football Star.

It was humbling.

“I was a punk my senior year, I’ll be the first to admit that,” he says. “I know looking back (at high school) I remember saying ‘Don’t get cocky,’ but at the same time, even though I was trying not to, it was impossible not to become cocky.

“Looking back I know this had to have happened to give me that slap in the face.”

Changing perspective

Suter’s health improved, but it came at a glacial pace.

Eventually, he was able to get up, get moving, begin working out again. His first priority was to strengthen his core muscles, a factor he believes led to his back problems in the first place.

“The last few months I’ve hit the weights similar to what I used to be able to do,” he says. “I feel good. There’s a little bit of pain, but at the rate I’ve been going, I’d imagine I’ll be free of that really soon.”

He’s also free of the pressure he may have felt of succeeding on the football field. He’ll be a student first at Grand Valley, and if football works out, he’ll gladly take it.

But it’s no longer priority No. 1 in his life.

“He really got to sit back and look at things,” VanOrman says. “He said ‘It’s all been about athletics and all been about football with me and now I have to look at things in a different light.’

“It made him realize there’s other things to life than just football, which I thought was a very mature thing to say for a young man. It was hard on him, but he’s come to grips with it.”

Since graduating from Petoskey in 2010, Suter has completed three semesters of courses at North Central Michigan College. He also helped coach in the Petoskey Middle School football program.

“I know I still have a long way to go,” Suter says. “Looking back, I really didn’t enjoy any of it, but the steps I’ve made ...”

Ready to go

Suter says he’s nearly back to his old self physically, and he’s much better off emotionally now, having endured over the past two years. He’s a chiseled 210 pounds and he’s been working out with Robbins, doing agility and footwork drills. He and a couple of his former Northmen football pals, Matt Rapelje and Adam Vargo, get together from time to time to toss the football around.

That gets Suter’s competitive juices flowing, and he knows he’s got more to give to the game.

He wants to be an athletic trainer and eventually get into physical therapy. That’ll be his major at Grand Valley. Ironically, what he’s been through over the past few years probably gives him a headstart in the field.

“I’ve seen quite a bit,” Suter says. “Now I’ve just got to get the book side of it.”

He’ll take his shot on the football field, too. VanOrman says two years away from contact likely won’t be a detriment because of Suter’s age, 20, and the fact that, he was, frankly, one of the very best ever to come through Petoskey.

He left Petoskey as a complete, albeit injured, football player.

He goes to Grand Valley as a complete young man.

“I’m not really worried,” he says. “It is what it is. My mind set is it’s not going to hurt. And if it hurts and hurts bad enough, I’ll say ‘You know what, I’ve got other things to do.’